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Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost always an inner experience.

Paul Theroux

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Paul Theroux
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 10
Film Writer
Novelist
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Paul Edward Theroux
Experience
States
Nothing
Exotic
Mind
Inner
Always
Travel
Existence
Almost
State

More quotes by Paul Theroux

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The journey, not the arrival, matters the voyage, not the landing.
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Albania in 1994 was the strangest place I've ever seen. It was like walking into the looking glass: falling apart, paranoid people, anarchy, no one farming, full of thieves. It was beyond any Third World country. They were living in their own private nightmare.
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One thing about cold weather: it brings out the statistician in everyone.
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Indian enterprises seemed to work so well they produced disasters success made them burst at the seams and the disruption of unprecedented orders led to shortages and finally failure.
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It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.
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One of the cardinal principles of Buddhism, the principle of neglect.
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Travel is an attitude, a state of mind. It is not residence, it is motion.
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I know there are writers who feel unhappy with domesticity and who even manufacture domestic turmoil in order to have something to write about. With me, though, the happier I feel, the better I write.
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I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better.
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The worst thing that can happen to you in travel is having a gun pointed at you by a very young person. That's happened to me maybe four times in my life. I didn't like it.
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The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.
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The conversation, like many others I had with people on trains, derived an easy candour from the shared journey, the comfort of the dining car, and the certain knowledge that neither of us would see each other again.
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Luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world.
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Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies.
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When I started writing, I did have some idealised notion of my dad as a writer. But I have less and less of a literary rivalry with him as I've gone on. I certainly don't feel I need his approval, although maybe that's because I'm confident that I've got it.
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Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.
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Basically, what you find out is the limits of your patience and your strength and your capacity to adapt. You find that out in travel and being alone and being tested. So that's a great thing.
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Animal lovers often tend to be misanthropes or loners, and so they transfer their affection to the creature in their control.
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It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places.
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Tourists who go to Africa have more of a traditional experience than Africans do. A tourist goes on safari Africans don't.
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